I actually just started Advair (fluticasone propionate and salmeterol) a couple weeks ago, after decades of not wanting to deal with a maintenance inhaler. I was starting to need my rescue inhaler way too often so I went for it, and I’m surprised how awesome it’s been. It’s one puff of a weird-tasting powder twice a day, but I haven’t used my rescue inhaler a single time since I started it.
Thirding this. I went for two of their pricey all-metal tabletop fans. Definitely a luxury purchase, but they’re built like tanks with sleek retro styling. These things will last the rest of my life.
They’re surprisingly quiet on low and medium, and sound pretty typical on high.
I had no idea about this, and I’ve been here for just over a year. Also, keep in mind which community this is.
Fuck. This is worse than I thought. I also really don’t like that I’d never heard of it, so thank you.
He might be my worst nightmare: an intelligent, opportunistic, disingenuous, duplicitous, hateful, proudly misogynistic, election-denying, authoritarian-curious chaos agent, wrapped in a young relatively attractive white man’s body. He will do a far better job than Trump ever could at making their sick regressive and paternalistic fantasies come true for all of us.
It sounds like she has some personality issues, but as someone who has lived in a bunch of different countries, I can attest that sometimes I forget how to pronounce certain words, and something weird can come out every once in a while. It’s rare, but some close friends and family have noticed and rightfully made fun of me for it. I really wouldn’t have noticed unless they pointed it out.
And don’t get me started on spelling…living in the UK for a while totally ruined my confidence with English spelling and turns of phrase. I also still say ‘cheers’ in lieu of ‘thanks’ more than I’d like to admit, and I’ve been back in the US for almost 8 years…
So yeah, your coworker sounds like a trip, but language is so goddamn confusing it’s totally possible that she has no idea how she sounds. Could also just be looking for attention, as others have suggested.
Customs agent: “I see that you just arrived from Russia. Did you meet with anyone under US sanctions? If so, who?”
Orban: “Yes. President Putin.”
Customs agent: “ummm okay…and what is the purpose of your visit to the United States?”
Orban: “To tell former president Trump about my visit with President Putin.”
Customs agent: “anything to declare?”
Orban: “no, just this priceless faberge egg that I’m holding for a friend.”
…is how I imagine it went.
I think of government as a relatively recent adaptation for our some of our species’ less socially-harmonious impulses. Government makes formal our ability to gather in groups and come to a shared understanding, across diverse and often contradictory belief systems. Humans have always been really good at this, but modern governments and their accompanying bureaucracies take it to the next level. Sure we lose some efficiency, but that’s what happens when you’ve got massive populations.
I believe government is meant to take the place of the caretakers of old who would have been responsible for the well-being of the group. If you think of government as an extension of ourselves, the part that cares for the collective for the benefit of the individual, and vice versa, then it’s one of the most critical components of our survival as a species.
Ideally, government should provide everything that an individual cannot provide for themselves. If a person isn’t a builder, then government should provide a place to live. If a person isn’t a farmer, then government should provide enough food to survive on. If a person isn’t a doctor, then the government should provide medical care. And so on. All the essentials we need to live should be provided by the government, because the government is us.
Ah yeah that makes sense. Though in the past I’ve gotten in trouble for trying to say who is and who isn’t a “real” Jew (many an argument about Messianic Jews over the dinner table). But yeah, anyone who supports genocide doesn’t deserve my respect, so I’m okay calling them not real Jews.
real Jews would never, ever, encourage this sort of behavior.
I really wish that were true. I’m a Jew, and I am fully against this genocide and Israel’s hypocrisy in general, but Israel is full of real Jews who absolutely encourage this behavior. It’s sad, demoralizing, and shameful, especially for us “normal” Jews who see it for the evil that it is, but I’m not sure enough of the world realizes how normalized this kind of violence is in Israel. I’ve spent a lot of time there, and the vapid, bloodthirsty hatred for Palestinians is absolutely real, and many many more Jews than you or I would like to believe support these atrocities.
I’m a descendant of Holocaust survivors, with a sizable contingent of family that escaped Europe to Israel, and I frankly won’t be talking to any of them ever again now that I know they happily support genocide.
I know you said to avoid the “just don’t connect it” advice, but I frankly think that’s your best bet without shelling out absurd amounts of money. I hate the concept of smart TVs, so like you I tried to find a reasonably priced dumb TV. Had zero luck. Instead, I bought a 55” Hisense TV (U8K) about 6 months ago, and have never once connected it to the internet. I think it’s technically a Google TV, but I wouldn’t know, since I just connect my devices to it, no internet necessary. It’s a gorgeous display with amazing picture quality. All the features are enabled, nothing was stuck behind an internet-wall. I don’t regret it.
Well that’s some backwards bullshit.
This makes me sick. Or rather, them sick. Or, whatever, this was a totally fucked up and inexcusable thing to do.
You’re totally right about the SEO industry. My comment wasn’t meant as an endorsement of SEO, I agree it’s one of the internet’s most fundamental problems. I’m just so frustrated by how consistently google lies about these things. Their first impulse, in so many different situations, is to immediately tell a bald-faced lie, then double down on the lie, and then when the truth comes out, they somehow always seem to get a pass. That’s what’s despicable to me.
But it did expose all the lies google has been telling about SEO and how it works with their algorithm. Basically all the times google was asked “so are you sure you don’t do x, y, or z to prioritize certain sites?” They said no, emphatically, despite some very clever folks who had a pretty good idea of how things were working based on independent tests and experiments on SEO. So google was lying all along, while trying to convince the experts that what they were seeing wasn’t real. Pretty despicable if you ask me.
This is the only answer I’m okay with. Keeping government away from it would be a challenge, but an easier challenge to handle than our current cesspool of for-profit media companies.
Same with elections, they should be fully funded by taxpayers, and not a single cent of private money should enter the equation. Depending on the office and the size of its constituency, every candidate gets the exact same amount. You accept a dollar from a corp? You’re automatically disqualified. Imagine how much harder candidates would have to work for their votes.
Couldn’t agree more. I was having this conversation with friends back in 08/09. No one took me seriously, but the red flags were all there for everyone to see. Facebook was caught using their platform to run sociological experiments on their users without consent, for example. That alone would get an academic or real researcher in serious trouble. But for an evil-corp like Facebook? Nothing but skepticism or disbelief from most people. It happened, people were harmed. Oh, and remember Myanmar?
The general publics’ overall sense of helplessness, apathy, and/or disbelief that the tech industry is doing anything untoward is their biggest victory. People are happily falling for it all over again with LLMs.
The best evidence for their common ancestry is from 2008, but it doesn’t look like there have been any new developments since then.
Molecular analysis of a shred of 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex protein — along with that of 21 modern species — confirms that dinosaurs share common ancestry with chickens, ostriches, and to a lesser extent, alligators.
Source Harvard Gazette
It’s takes real skill to take a concept that has been developed over years of highly technical debate and scholarship and make it understandable with normal language, even if the underlying concepts are actually super simple.
I think a reason for this is that in highly technical or complex fields, it’s counterintuitively easier to speak in full jargon, since that’s how ideas are developed and how people in the field are convinced of their validity. Using language for the “public” can often mean you lose some of the more subtle meanings, though you’re right that at the end of the day the explanations that we end up with are usually easy for most people to understand.
So I think it’s actually pretty natural to start with jargon and then refine the ideas by translating them into normal speak.
I was in second grade when the school district started thinking about providing internet access for a few computers. You could just add a period at the end of a URL to get around the filters. No idea how or why it worked, but I told everyone. Those were the days.